The Moor's Tale

You wonder what the border cops could've thought to see us two big-winged birds, me and Priest, en route from the old French Riviera to Rome on his Church-bought motorcycle, him puffing heavy on a giant-size cigar, steering us down the white line when there was one, and me black colored with my guitar between my knees in the sidecar, hanging on for Christian love, praying for rain or a roadblock.

Speed was his meat. I had give away my St. Christopher's in Cannes, and now I was sorry. It was great going for him--he at least had a set of beads for God's grace and good luck--but he like to scared me white that time passing a passenger bus on a mean curve coming into Monaco. The Riviera is rugged highway all the way, just hugging the side of a mountain with artichokes growing along the edge and a long-way drop down to the Mediterranean Sea on the other side.

We got by the frontier fine: He showed his white collar for ID--me, a U. S. passport. Customs didn't even trouble us to open our knapsacks. That's a good thing about traveling with the Church. We set up a cloud of motorcycle smoke getting out of there and never stopped till we got stopped by a picket fence around a hand-pump gas station just this side of Ventimiglia. Clipped off about five meters of pickets. Nobody hurt, not a splinter hit us; his motorcycle was all right and so was my guitar. Off again, hell bent for heaven, and never slowed till Spezia where I talked him into time out. I had to go something terrible.

We parked under an orange tree with oranges on it. I took my guitar with me, and my duffel bag, for safety from thieves. I myself wouldn't steal a man's guitar out of a priest's motorcycle, but there's people in this world that would. Priest bought me a big dish of gelati--seven different flavors piled up in a pyramid, awful good ice cream--in an ice-cream parlor where they had the chairs all turned one way to watch television, so we sat at (continued on page 80)Moor's Tale(continued from page 59) the bar. Here was I, come all the way to Italy mainly for the music and find out television and jukeboxes got here ahead of me. Television is the end of anybody's music. I blame it mainly on the U. S.

Back outside on the flying machine again, tearing out of Spezia, Priest asked me through the thunder, "All right, drive all night?"

Me and the priest talked pidgin English and French. I didn't know no Italian. I couldn't hear him any too good for the cigar in his mouth and the motor exploding. What I actually wanted to do was rest up somewhere and get the kinks out of my backside, but I was polite and said, "Sure." And was right away sorry for it.

Priest wanted to talk, tell me all his monastery adventures, where he was from (Ravenna), his poor old mother's high blood pressure--talking against a motorcycle motor, might as well shoot the breeze next to a hydraulic drill--talking anyway out the side of his mouth to keep his cigar in his teeth, cigar sparks in a funnel and backfire fireworks trailing behind us. He wanted me on top of it to tell him my life and travels.

Twisty roads with hardly any light. Liable any minute to hit a donkey cart.

"What say? What say?" he kept saying when I tried to talk.

You don't see the sights that way or catch your breath.

Coming into Florence a little past sunup--sunup is tricky light to drive by--we smashed straightaway into a chicken. Motorcycle slid all the way around full circle and scared a milk truck off the road. Nobody got hurt but the chicken. When Priest got off his mount to check the carcass, I got out my side and my gear with me. I didn't know Italian, but I sure knew enough was basta.

Milkman mad as hell, but with Priest stooped over giving the chicken final rites he couldn't allow his self to cuss. Then Priest looked up to see me standing picking chicken feathers out of my guitar strings.

"You go Rome avec moi. N'est-ce pas true? I go straight all away Holy City."

"No thanks, Father," says I. Then I lied and told him I had a buddy I wanted to see in Florence, not to make him feel bad. I figured, confidential, with his madman driving we might likely get to the Holy City a whole lot sooner'n we thought.

• • •

I lucky enough met my meal ticket at a birthday-cake picture gallery named Uffizi right off the old square where I was in looking at pictures one day. She was up on about the third layer, painting a copy picture of a picnic of a bunch of ladies in thinny, almost nothing dresses, passing around grapes and melon slices and some pretty horny old men looking through the weeds at them. When she took notice of me watching her paint she tried me in German--which is what I figured her for--and I answered back in French. Then she went to English and we settled for that.

"You like it?"

I said yes.

"Which one?" she said, testing me.

"They all look about the same in those cellophane dresses."

"I mean which painting?" She meant which painting did I like the best.

"Yours's plenty good enough for me."

Somehow everything I said sounded personal.

I circled around her and her picture a minute, and she gave me the up-and-down with her big blue Berlin eyes--two new dogs sniffing each other out. I sniffed her out "money" and she naturally sniffed me out "broke." She put her paintbrush into turpentine and said she'd buy me a Cinzano. I said fine.

Her name was Eva. We drank out on the porch terrace looking over Piazza Della Signoria with old David down there standing up taking the sun and some more statues inside in the shade and a whole world of rooftop tiles and yellowy sides of old houses and tourists sitting under umbrellas and awnings. She sipped tea and talked about this friend of hers, some girl named Della Robbia, and how Florence was the "last lovely flower bud of Western civilization" while I sat relaxed with my Cinzano watching the pigeons dirty up David.

Then she up and asked, "Would you care to pose for me?"

"Why not?" says I.

• • •

Don't think all the artists are off starving in Bohemia someplace, not Eva. She had a villa with a maid and could afford to keep me in her bell tower with my own bed, that's how well off she was. One whole side of the house was glassed in so you could look out at the garden without getting mosquito-bit. The glassed-in place was where she kept her paint stuff and where I posed. She posed me regular, afternoons, one to four. Then tea break at four come hell or high water.

Said she wanted to paint "the man entire," which was me, stripped to the short hairs. She at least sat wrapped up in a kimono on a paint stool, squinting around the edge of her easel at me, getting my measures. Same time, just before she started in serious, smearing paint, I was getting her measures, too. She was big German-built, to last, put together real nice, though--big behind and good big bosoms but not bubbly, solid. I liked her in her kimono, never no make-up around the house, her blondey white braid wound up on top of her head like whipped cream. She was so white sitting stone solid against a white wall that you couldn't hardly see her except for blue eyes and paint spots all over her kimono.

She generally posed me naked, but sometimes I got rigged up like Halloween: I was all dressed up, and sat on a throne, the time I was Pope Innocent, but for Adam all I wore was some grape leaves and had to stand up the whole time. I carried a paring knife to be Hamlet, and a cardboard sword for Charlemagne. Eva was on a big historical kick. For a while there I was Parsifal and Mercury and Brutus and Beowulf and Spirit of the Renaissance (with a flashlight for a torch) and Saint Christopher and Hannibal and Judas and Jesus Christ, all in one week, everybody painted black, like me.

I got drew, and painted, in just about every position: straight up, leaned back, laid down or however she wanted. Whichever way she put me I had to stand still or die, but I did it. I been searched so much by the police force I knew by now how to stand still.

But posing for art is about the boringest work I ever did. You can only look at one place at a time, till you memorize it, then you have to keep on looking at it for what seems like forever. Before I was through I memorized her and her easel and the glassed-in room and all. And I would itch in the worst places and wasn't allowed to scratch. Sometimes she faced me looking out at the garden which was a lucky relief, seeing some green for a change: hedges shaved with a razor and nice neat gravel paths, everything laid out like a geometry problem.

Eva never talked when she painted, just scratched at her picture and breathed heavy. She never seemed like she noticed here I was a naked man standing around her art room with her. Never the least monkey business, just paint. If that's the way it was, it was OK by me, but not much variety. She did at least play Vivaldi music on the record player while she painted. I like the one about the different seasons of the year, but that's hard music to stand still to.

Four-o'clock tea always caught me with my pants down, so to speak. It was brought in on a tea wagon by a frisky little Italian maid, everything silver, and a Cinzano for me. Up to now I was a Pope or Parsifal when she came in, or carried a basketball or something I could hide behind, but this one time all I had was a bow and arrow in my hands and the rest of it was just plain me. Maid was cute-built, a starched-up little package all tied in ribbons, everything neat and where it should be. Generally she whipped past me, tending to her cart and her business, like she wore horse blinders, but this one time she wiggled her behind at me, full of sass, and took a (continued on page 119)Moor's Tale(continued from page 80) quick peek at me in my birthday suit when she went by.

It was right when two Vivaldi horns were fighting it out for first place, and the record got stuck. I felt myself get warm-blooded. Eva got burned up when what happened happened, but I'm a natural man and got natural reactions. All Eva could do was tap her paintbrush on the tea table till the maid went and changed the record and went out and I went back to normal again.

Nights Eva went to the opera or antique stores where she got herself good and pinched by "degenerate Italians." I stayed home. I stayed up in my bell-tower bedroom with an actual big bell in the center--which was rung, Eva claimed, the day some guy named Savonarola got burned up in the old square. You had to walk all around that bell to get anywhere up there, and it took up a helluva lot of space, but it was historical so it had to stay. But I was comfortable up in that tower where I had me, private, my own little bird's nest at the top end of a turn-around stair ladder. The bell used to sound out of a hole in the roof, but that was glassed in with a skylight, now, to keep you from getting rained on. Just me and my little army-cot bed up there, strumming guitar, looking through the sky window at the stars. Big bell and water pitcher for company.

Then, the night of that same day when my reactions showed, and got noticed, Eva got in late from the opera and changed her tune. Sang up to me in my bell tower, wouldn't I like to join her for Cinzano and crackers? So I went down.

It was in her bedroom and her bedroom was different designed from mine, by a long sight. Checkerboard floor and rugs on the walls and a tent top hung over her bed, with tassels. She was wearing a nightdress thin as kitchen curtains like those ladies wore in that picture she painted. Right off the bat she told me she was married, which surprised me--I never had the least idea of it or saw her wear a ring. He was Italian.

"He's in Rome, thank God," drinking her drink, "in the Mafia where he came from, or in jail where he belongs."

Glasses had stems as long as cigarette holders and I had to be careful not to break mine.

"He was a great coward ... his idea of art was a collection of movie-star photographs ... stole change out of my handbag, you know ... I've seen him pick his nose when he thought I wasn't watching."

The more she told the less I gave a damn. I've knew too many like him and I was probably some like him myself. If ever I met up with him anywhere we would've been friends. Then later she claimed his family was nobility--and so was hers--and he was practically a prince, but a degenerate one. So I never got the whole straight of it, bastard or prince, rat or royalty.

Two drinks and she was calling me her Othello and said to call her Desdemona. Then she put the lights out and the Vivaldi on.

• • •

After that I got called down to bed regular, but only opera nights. Eva was all clockwork when it came to bed. She had everything all organized her way, laid out like her garden, and she made up the regulations. About as much surprise to her as a calendar. But I was better off, I guess, than going to bed every night with a bell.

At first I was halfway afraid what would happen if her old man showed up some opera night. But I soon enough got to where I knew he wasn't ever coming back. My time I spent in Eva's fancy four-poster under that velvety awning with her coat of arms embroidered on it, I learned all about Eva and at the same time how it was her man took off like he did. Take more'n a coat of anybody's arms to keep a man steady in that lady's bed.

I got tired of the whole routine, naturally, just like her husband did that ran off. That's a repetitious song to sing, that cradle song. Eva wasn't no Desdemona and me Othello. About the only really pretty thing she did nights was take her hair down out of that braid and spread it out. And I was right next door to being a kept man, all the time telling myself I was posing for art, to keep my respect up. My guitar music was getting no place, and me, too. Another thing, that cute little teatime maid was working under my fingernails, getting to be a deep-down itch I couldn't scratch out to save my soul.

Things finally at last came to a kind of a closing note one night when Eva went off to Il Trovatore in her usual opera-night horse taxi. I never did get invited to go with her to the opera when she went--I never did see an opera, and I've never rode in a horse carriage either, but that was her way. She made her gold braid up into a crown and wrapped herself up in a red cape, carrying her special silver-handle pocketbook and mother-pearl spyglasses for style. She swished by me at the doorstep like I was Cinderella or I was supposed to kiss her hand goodbye or something, but I never did.

That was the night, Il Trovatore night, when there was an electric storm come up all of a sudden. Terrific rain, and the garden like to got washed down some sewer and the lights all went out all over the villa. My sweet maid climbed up that twisty iron ladder to bring me some candles, carrying one lit one herself. She looked awful lovely in candlelight. I didn't know Italian, but I had sense enough to talk fast, whatever I talked, and made up the words as I went along.

"Gracious per los candles. Como llama your name?"

She just smiled, happy, and put the candles in a candleholder.

"You like pizza?" There wasn't no pizza, but that's all I could think to say.

She just smiled, but she was listening.

"A rivederci Florencia, Roma next place," I made wings to show her I was leaving Florence, time running out, you got to make hay in harvest.

She never got it.

I put my head in my hands, folded, to show sleep, and said, "Esta notte solo. Mañana finito," then tried to show myself flying out of the skylight, elsewhere, gone forever. But she didn't bite.

I made a Mussolini face and she at least giggled. I didn't know if it was for or against. I poured a little water from the drinking pitcher on the floor and did a little shuffling soft shoe in the puddle. She giggled some more. I took her starchy maid hat off of her and put it on my head and acted like I was serving tea to Eva. She laughed out loud.

Then she quieted down and pointed to my guitar where it was standing in the corner on the other side of the bell. Now I knew I was home. I got all flooded up with confidence when I took up my music box and strummed out some introduction chords. She sat down on the bed to listen, just where I wanted her.

I played to her. I played up a mood and the rest was rain hitting on the skylight. We worked out sign language till our fingers got tangled together, and you don't need words after that.

Naturally, nobody had give a thought to Il Trovatore. Well, the opera was out of lights, too, so the singing show was off. Next thing I knew was Eva, standing stark blondey white in my doorframe, before I could think.

Eva dropped her opera glasses, but we were all three took by surprise.

Then I said, stupid, "She only came up to teach me some Italian," or some dumb thing like that, her clothes scattered all the way under the bell, trailing from the candles to my pillow--and her on my pillow with me.

Eva suddenly hissed a little hiss, backed back, and slammed down out of my tower, high heels clattering down that spiral stair ladder.

Never saw a maid move so fast as Eva's did, popping out of my bed and trying to get into her maid suit again. Quick as a fireman, but not near quick enough. Because right then was when the fire bell went off. Eva had got hold of the bell cord down there someplace and was pulling the life out of it. Bell heaved over at us and like to near knocked the maid flat, but she ducked under and ducked out, her clothes only half on, the last sight I ever saw of her. Me, I hung onto my cot and poked my guitar fingers in my ears, but that first gong struck one o'clock anyway, right through my skull. Next note put me into shock, and I tried to climb through the mattress into China. Bell went right on ringing thundering doomsday for I don't know how many tolls after that.

• • •

Monastery monks at Siena were awful good to me: put me up three nights and two days, no charge. And they even gave me chianti wine two times a day, because I was a civilian. They wanted me to stay right on and maybe finally be a monk like them. Since I always sat in the refectory mealtimes with my head cocked to one side, listening, I think they thought I was hearing holy voices.

But I had to go to the head abbot monk one day to tell him, in all sincereness--he spoke good English, "I'm a music man, awful sensitive to sound." I showed him my guitar for evidence. "Appreciate your kindness and the chow and the bunk ... but all that ringing of bells, you know, vespers and matins and all, well, it's a real torment to my soul ... Father, could you please point me out which way's the way to Rome?"